Ayankoko & N. Stammberger – Catfusion

Ayan Records

Catfusion is a slow-burn collision of matter and breath, a three-part ritual where electronic density and acoustic volatility refuse hierarchy. Across catfusion I, II, III, Ayankoko and Norbert R. Stammberger construct a shared terrain in which evolving SuperCollider drones act less as background than as geological pressure—shifting, grinding, opening fissures for saxophone, noise, and resonant objects to erupt through.

Ayankoko, the French-Asian sound artist and founder of Ayan Records, brings a sculptor’s sense of time and mass. His electronics are patient but never static: long-form drones swell, corrode, and reconfigure themselves, sometimes humming with near-liturgical calm, sometimes tearing into abrasive spectra. These textures feel lived-in, as if they’ve been running long before the listener arrived. Against this, Stammberger’s saxophone does not “solo” in any traditional sense—it interrogates. Air splits into multiphonics, key clicks scrape against feedback, and breath becomes noise. His background as a philosopher, improviser, and operator of Munich’s <Noise – no music> concert series is audible in the way sound is treated as argument rather than ornament.

The real strength of catfusion lies in the tension between composition and improvisation. Stammberger—founder of GNU Records & Publishing and the KlangBuero (SoundOffice)—moves fluently between extended playing techniques and electronic interaction, never settling into comfort. The saxophone sometimes rides the drone like a fault line, sometimes dissolves into it, sometimes resists entirely. Objects and noise electronics puncture the surface, adding a tactile, almost brutal physicality that keeps the music from drifting into pure abstraction.

Each of the three tracks feels like a different phase of the same organism. Catfusion I establishes the terrain: dense, immersive, and ominously spacious. Catfusion II is the most volatile, where free jazz gestures and noise collide head-on, friction becoming the music’s primary engine. Catfusion III pulls inward—not quieter, but more internal—letting resonance, decay, and negative space speak as loudly as any blast of sound.

Released on Ayan Records, catfusion is uncompromising experimental music that rewards deep listening. It’s not about fusion as genre, but fusion as process: bodies, machines, philosophies, and raw sound merging into something unstable and alive. For listeners drawn to the edges of electronic music, free improvisation, and noise, this album doesn’t explain itself—it confronts you, and listens back.

Ayankoko / David Vilayleck: drones

Norbert Stammberger : saxophones, objects

An ongoing online collaboration , recorded January 2026.

Produced , mixed and mastered: Ayankoko

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